[ spoiler alert ]
What could be more ordinary than a man getting out of his bath in 2010 ? And what could be more shocking than this same everyday scene in 1884 ? The question of male beauty.
Christophe Honoré’s 2010 film "Homme au bain" (Man at Bath) doesn’t offer a story in itself, but rather a kind of contemplative essay. Starting with a romantic breakup, we follow Emmanuel, dumped by his boyfriend after he raped him, as he finds himself alone. This character is not ordinary, he’s an extraordinary figure of male beauty, and his body is, with little success, his money maker. Emmanuel is a solitary man, living in a dehumanizing urban town called Gennevilliers. Filling his days with attempts to stave off boredom, playing with his body, or simply inhabiting it, alone, his life is a wandering. Is embodying beauty as a lifeline, profession, and vocation - a beauty that attracts others but doesn’t guarantee genuine encounters - an easy life ? This question overlaps both the character and his actor. As a mirror, another character, Kate, also embodies beauty, feminine, and unlike Emmanuel, she is very surrounded, very busy in a vibrant New York universe full of life and people, yet she too, in this whirlwind, seeks to fill a post-breakup life. The film demonstrates that beauty is not enough for love.
Honoré’s "Man at Bath" is set in a much less bourgeois environment than the Gennevilliers town experienced by Gustave Caillebotte, the French painter who, in 1884, exhibited his "Man at Bath" to art circles, more accustomed to sensual young women like those of Manet or Degas. His canvas, like others, disturbed or even shocked the amateurs of the time, as if Impressionism sought to blur male nudity, so fashionable during the Renaissance. Perspectives on the male body may change, or ass, but what remains across time is the desire provoked by beauty.
To cast Emmanuel, Honoré chose a French star of gay culture, François Sagat, who began a notable filmography in adult cinema in 2005 with Citébeur, under other aliases, and who was already well-established under his own name by 2010 in over maybe 50 DVDs, notably for two major American studios, Raging Stallion and Titan Media. He was rewarded with a GayVN Award in 2007 as performer of the year. The actor is a perfect choice, as his engagement in adult sexual entertainment is only part of his own research, he plays with codes of virility and masculinity, both through his personal work on his body and how he exposes it, which he does himself on the web or with photographers, who had already noticed him. He also stood out by engaging in HIV prevention with the French gay media called Yagg, when porn pros were accused of promoting unsafe practices, bareback. He also appeared in a porn-gore film by Bruce LaBruce called L.A. Zombie, and he even appeared in Saw VI. François Sagat already had many other projects in mind, always with the male body and its beauty, its image, as the main subject.
So it’s François Sagat who’s in charge of embodying male beauty, this man in the bath, and Christophe Honoré doesn’t add any artifice. The film is shot quickly, with no fancy lighting, no luts, no artificial beauty, to stick to palpable reality, and rediscover the sense of raw beauty of the domestic body.
Christophe Honoré develops this idea from French writer Marcel Proust, "Beauty is said to be a promise of happiness,…" but nothing says that this promise will be kept. From the beginning of the film, a couple, in a sadly civilized concrete urban universe, breaks up after a non-consented sexual act, a normalized form of marital rape as society now strongly denounces it. Don’t we speak of fierce beauty or the beauty of the devil ? With his neighbor, Emmanuel has a different relationship. A paid relationship, to embody a fantasy, ignite desire, offer himself as a sculpture out of a museum that one could rent. Beauty as living art at home, and a sexual object to be consumed. Masked beauty, beauty for its own sake, which aims not only to generate sexual desire but also emotion. And with time, beauty exhausts emotion. Male beauty in its most virile form is questioned: should it serve only to express strength and domination ?
Through two parallel stories, Christophe Honoré attempts an essay, a wandering, on the desire for sex, desire for love, and other questions for the beauty of the male body. So what place for "average" ? And if ultimately beauty was not just plastic, but exalted by an emotion, simply coming from a laugh, a look, or the shadow of a hip. This further illustrates Proust, who ends his sentence with "… Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty."
Other subjects are present in the film, songs that speak for the characters, Honoré camera in hand, as if delivering a page of an diary revealed to tell the same quest, with pieces of truth and pieces of fiction inside, and moments mired in the immobility of his thoughts (perhaps his remorse) with an intimate reflection of himself : "I’m not comfortable with actors," and also literary references, which I’ll let you discover.
In terms of lgbition (LGBTI representation), the narrative proposal of "Man at Bath" is composed of rare heterosexual characters among the main ones who are homosexuals, and whose treatment is hardly differentiated. The homosexuality of the characters doesn’t have a positive impact, with rape, prostitution, insults, internalized homophobia, yet, the film is softened by this languorous beauty that runs through it, for beauty has this profoundly unfair ability to create indulgence. Little indulgence from critics, who were harsh upon the film’s release, some regretting a form of vacuity, but that is precisely the film’s question : Life seems empty when beauty has not fulfilled its promise of happiness.
François Sagat on Instagram.
